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BU to present urban inequality scholar Elijah Anderson

BLOOMSBURG—Elijah Anderson, Ph.D., one of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists and the William K. Lanman Professor of Sociology at Yale University, is the keynote speaker for the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania College of Liberal Arts (COLA) Symposium.

Anderson will present "The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life" on Thursday, Oct. 4, at 7:30 p.m. in Carver Hall's Kenneth S. Gross Auditorium. His keynote speech is free and open to the public.

Anderson is one of the nation’s most respected scholars in the field of urban inequality. His books include “Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City,” winner of the 2000 Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Association; “Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community,” winner of the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park award for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology; and the classic sociological work, “A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men.”

He has also written numerous articles on the black experience, including "Of Old Heads and Young Boys: Notes on the Urban Black Experience," commissioned by the National Research Council's Committee on the Status of Black Americans; "Sex Codes and Family Life among Inner-City Youth" in the January 1989 issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; and "The Code of the Streets," which was the cover story of the May 1994 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which was published in expanded form in his book “Code of the Street.”

This will be Anderson’s second visit to campus having first spoken at Bloomsburg in the late 1970’s at the invitation of BU Department of Sociology professor Christopher F. Armstrong, Ph.D.

The talk is part of the COLA Symposium held each fall where liberal arts graduates return to campus for student, faculty and alumni panels on several key topics such as careers in the arts, entrepreneurship in media and dressing for success.